Landmark

Ann Thompson still marvels at the sliver of ranchland she has lived on for the last eight years. "I fell in love with the house," she says of the Spanish Colonial-style home known as the DeWenter Mansion that sits in the quiet foothills of La Verne. "For my husband, it was the property. " Thompson is the most recent resident of an enduring landmark that recalls the heyday of the orange and lemon industry that brought millions of dollars to La Verne in the early 20th century. Many of the original citrus trees still surround the house at this onetime ranch.

The Clippers needed an answer, and quick. They gave one, and wow. Their response Monday night to a playoff-opening debacle against the Golden State Warriors was powerful enough to temporarily subdue thoughts of the historic Clippers jinx while empowering dreams of a landmark Clippers spring. The answer was visible across the Staples Center sky in a flying Blake Griffin, and across the Staples Center floor in a skidding Chris Paul. The answer was audible on the Staples Center sideline with a screaming and confrontational Doc Rivers, and in the stands with thousands of red shirts whose owners' roars lasted deep into the sweaty night.

A ranch-style Brentwood house designed by noted architect Paul R. Williams and threatened last November with demolition has been designated as a Los Angeles landmark. The city of Los Angeles initiated the landmark status after Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger and other preservation-minded neighbors alerted officials to the structure's imminent razing. The Los Angeles City Council voted April 2 to declare the residence a historic-cultural monument. The 1940 house in the leafy Oakmont section of Brentwood was built for Nelle Payton Hunt, widow of Willis G. Hunt, a paper company executive.

A ranch-style Brentwood house designed by noted architect Paul R. Williams and threatened last November with demolition has been designated as a Los Angeles landmark. The city of Los Angeles initiated the landmark status after Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger and other preservation-minded neighbors alerted officials to the structure's imminent razing. The Los Angeles City Council voted April 2 to declare the residence a historic-cultural monument. The 1940 house in the leafy Oakmont section of Brentwood was built for Nelle Payton Hunt, widow of Willis G. Hunt, a paper company executive.

The lonely Zumwalt Prairie Preserve in the northeast corner of Oregon features thousands of acres of native grasslands. It's not easy to get to, and less than 500 people a year visit, but it's an important place because it represents one of the country's vanishing landscapes. The National Park Service on Tuesday announced the designation of the preserve as a national natural landmark, singling it out as the best example of bunchgrass prairie that still stands. "It's a great honor to be recognized as one of the best remaining examples of this type of landscape," says Jeff Fields, northeast Oregon project director for the Nature Conservancy.

How can our schools teach children respect for the past if they have none themselves? L.A. Unified's decision to raze the KEHE radio building is another harmful, destructive act by an ignorant bureaucracy--and adds another significant landmark to L.A.'s long obituary of demolished architecture ("Failing a Landmark," July 15, by Nicolai Ouroussoff.) There are many successful Moderne schools in Los Angeles still in use, so why not build a school that complements the existing structure?

Los Angeles Cultural Heritage commissioners voted Thursday to reject a proposal that would have designated a Silver Lake home the city's 1,038th historic-cultural landmark. Neighbors and other preservationists had urged the panel to preserve the Waverly Drive residence designed by pioneering Chinese American architect Gilbert L. Leong. Last year, a Beverly Hills developer purchased the so-called Tirado house - built in 1959 for Dr. Miguel Tirado and his wife - and announced plans to build five three-story houses on the lot through the city's small-lot subdivision ordinance.

A kiss can last forever, at least on San Diego's waterfront. "Unconditional Surrender," the 25-foot sculpture of a sailor and a nurse kissing to mark the end of World War II , is scheduled to be taken down Wednesday from Tuna Harbor Park in front of the U.S.S. Midway Museum and shipped to New Jersey for restoration, according to a Unified Port of San Diego statement. But that's not where the Big Kiss ends. The Midway Museum announced Saturday that it has raised $1 million in a "Save the Kiss" campaign and will underwrite a permanent bronze copy of the J. Seward Johnson sculpture.

Gregory Kelly is a small-scale historian who is out to memorialize big-time Southern California landmarks, one by one. There's the miniature Watts Towers, an elaborate depiction of Newport Beach's Balboa Pavilion and a proportionally correct model of Silver Lake's Music Box Steps - all tucked in Kelly's crowded Tustin hobby shop. Not bad for a man who had never even built a plastic model airplane before deciding at age 20 to open his own shop in a building owned by his father.

A monthlong mystery over who illuminated the big grin on Simi Valley's Happy Face Hill has been solved: Two sisters, ages 3 and 7, did it. "They wanted to surprise me because they knew how much I love the happy face," said their mother, Allison Robertson of Simi Valley. Robertson is a business administration student at Moorpark College who tries to do her studying on weekends. Her husband, Doug, takes Tabitha and Evelyn on Saturday jaunts to give her some peace when she hits the books.

A sliver of a yard can be a powerful thing. Materials & Applications has proved this time and again by collaborating with architects to put up fantastical creations on a 25-by-40-foot gravel yard fronting Silver Lake Boulevard. Past double-take-worthy installations include a golden-leafed Mylar canopy in the shape of a black hole by Ball-Nogues Studio, a motorized vegetative cover that opens and refolds like origami by Eddie Sykes and a sinuous, fire-shaped gazebo made of pressure-laminated panels by Edmund Ming-Yip Kwong.

OKLAHOMA CITY - Oklahoma traces its contemporary history to pioneers who populated the prairies. Now, new urban pioneers are repopulating the capital, Oklahoma City, as restaurateurs re-imagine landmark buildings and create new communities around them. They could hardly have come at a better time: The local economy is booming, and Forbes ranks OKC as the nation's eighth-fastest-growing city, thanks to thriving oil, gas and wind-power sectors as well as fracking. I was here in September for a consulting job, and I extended my stay to find these restaurants with a previous life.

In one of his earliest boyhood memories, Dion Neutra walked out the front door of his family's Silver Lake home and down to the water's edge. It was the early 1930s, and the wall around Silver Lake Reservoir was so low that he could fling a fishing line above it and into the water. But over the next eight decades, the architect - who trained under his father, Richard Neutra, a master of Modernism who lived and worked out of Silver Lake - watched as the water he loved began to change.

The Lou Henry Hoover House, designed by the wife of Herbert Hoover as their permanent residence before he became President, has been designated a national historic landmark by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The routes American railroads follow were laid out almost exclusively in the 19th and 20th centuries, when trains were symbols of modernity and industrial power. And today, riding a train - especially in the United States - can feel like stepping into a time machine. Tom Zoellner enters this time machine again and again in his highly entertaining, lucid and perceptive travelogue "Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World - From the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief.

Laugh all you want at those old public-access television clips of the late Dr. Gene Scott, the eccentric televangelist who sometimes wore two pairs of glasses at once and shouted at viewers to "Get on the telephone!" whenever his fundraising totals ebbed. He and his Los Angeles Universal Cathedral, operating from the 1927 United Artists Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, turned out to be surprisingly good friends to historic preservation. And say what you will about the quixotic plan hatched in 2000 by Bishop Kenneth Ulmer of the Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood to turn the Forum, once home to Magic Johnson's "Showtime" Lakers and Wayne Gretzky's Kings, into a thriving combination of mega-church and high-end arena.